SKR's problem with certain high level encounters

[drnuncheon]

I guess I don't see it as such a problem that rogues nor clerics will be especially effective against this baddie:

-Rogues are always nigh-useless against undead.
-The cleric has lots of other cool toys besides turning undead that can work against this (magic circle vs. evil, gate, etc.)

That depends on the rogue. While they're not going to do nearly as much as a fighter, the rogue can still use quite a few tactics to their advantage. The loss of sneak attack is not a killer.

First of all, assuming your fighter is a classic 'tank', he's not going to like the fact that the thing is incorporeal - all the benefit of that magic armor goes away, leaving him with his Dex bonus - which is limited by that armor. The rogue is going to be far better off here.

Second, even though flanking won't let the rogue sneak attack, it will give him and his flanking partner a +2 to hit. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially because it'll let the both of them land more blows.

So, the rogue isn't going to be king vs. the effigy, but he can still make a contribution.

Some other points that haven't been brought up yet:

Stupid names are a D&D tradition dating way back. C'mon...nilbogs?

A simple magic circle or protection against evil will keep the effigy from controlling anyone with its infusion ability. If you cast it before the effigy infuses anyone, it can't even do that.

Oh, and the reason it has the Jump and Tumble and other physical skills is pretty obvious to me: so it can use them when it's infused a character.

J

 

[rounser]

It is a system, for example, which says that adding 3 levels of druid to a troll and adding 3 levels of fighter to a troll accomplish the same thing (which, I believe, is the biggest problem with the CR system). If we relied more on design judgement, we'd get better accuracy.

Isn't it just that it's very difficult to get a system that accounts for synergy? It's easy to eyeball an enhanced troll with tacked on fire and acid resistance and say, "Houston, we may have a problem here", but to develop a system that was smart enough to do the same...well, that would probably require an expert system. In other words, software would be needed to cover it, the complexity level being that high...hmmmm....

 

[EOL]

Typically, SR is calibrated so that about half the spells thrown at it fail.
TYPICAL saves mean that the spellcaster's highest spells will be saved against around half the time.
With HD beyond CR, the enhanced saves will give say a 3/4 likelihood of saving. (I don't have the ELH on hand so this is something of a guesstimate)

Now, a PC spellcaster casting a spell on this (hypothetical) monster has a 1/8 chance of their spell actually affecting it.

I think the biggest problem in high level combat is a lack of granularity. In the example above (assuming the numbers are correct ) 7/8th's of the time the wizard/sorcerer does nothing to the monster. 1/8th of the time the incapacitate it or outright kill it. With respect to magic and SR (and to a lesser extent with other mechanics) it's an all or nothing proposition.

What the system needs is granularity, much like the normal attack/hp/DR system. Generally even with high DR there are ways to get around it or ways to at least do some damage almost every round. This makes the fighters useful all the time. the same can not be said of the casters. (Iron Golem anyone?)

Now as to how to add granularity, that I leave to better minds than mine, but I think it's one of the key problems with how high-level defenses are structured.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Change everything so it goes off hitpoints? So that each and every spell in the book does damage, and the full effect of a spell only takes place when the target is out of hit points? Then instant kill spells are transmuted into pure save-for-half damage spells, and you need to beat the crap out of monsters in order to charm or hold person them anyway... Hitpoints gain value (which increases the power of high-level fighter-types), and instant-kill combats become more difficult. Furthermore the balance of the game could be adjusted across the board by scaling hitpoints.

 

[mmadsen]

What the system needs is granularity, much like the normal attack/hp/DR system.

I agree with what I think you mean: many high-level spells (and abilities) are Save-or-Die, with no middle ground. The game goes out of its way to grant characters outrageous Hit Point totals and amazing spells -- then it backpedals and tries to circumvent them.

Instant-death spells and ability-damaging poisons are examples of this, game mechanics designed to get around high-level characters' strengths. A 6th-level Flesh to Stone spell or a Black Adder's venomous bite is actually less threatening to the average peasant than a single sword stroke or a 1st-level Magic Missile spell.

 

[Graf]

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When I read the Effigy when they first released the stats I had to agree that it sounded a bit powerful and a bit lame.

However I think that attitude was probably wrong. I've been DMing a lot and I think what makes a good encounter is "something interesting". It can be threatening and powerful or it can just be thought provoking but that's what makes for cool encounters.
The premise of the monster (the effigy) is good, it does numerious interesting things to people and (despite what people seem to think) can be handled in numerous ways. Many of which have been mentioned and ignored on this very thread.

SKR is almost certainly right about the monster stats being out of whack with the WotC system. While it being a WotC product doesn't make it immune it would be nice to see these unwritten rules written down somewhere; both SKR and MC refer to stuff like this frequently but the original monster creation article in Dragon didn't touch on this stuff and while it trickles through comments on message boards it would be nice to see a concrete version.
[edit: I think the short names thing was definitely in the article but a lot of the other unwriteen rules that, mostly 3rd party, publishers have been criticized for note adhering to during monster creation aren't written out anywhere.]

A more complex xp system probably sounds nice in theory but its not really. As soon as something changes (the poison from a previous encounter takes effect and knocks out the barbarian, a wandering monster steal's the sword of ghost touch, etc) the ssytem suddenly falls out of wack.
I'm not saying that some effort on this front shouldn't be made, just that making up a bunch of categories and trying to squeeze things in is wierd.

The Law of Large Numbers
With regard to lack of equality with CRs I think its fairly obvious that the system isn't correct. As an example: in the Banewarrens the first chapter culminates in a fight with a CR 7 monster. Another CR 7 monster related to a troll shows up two chapters later. Both creatures have good reasons for being CR7 but the second one is much more dangerous to just about any party.
I don't think this is a big deal. Over the course of their character's adventuring careers, the adventuring careers of all their characters, of all the characters of people on these boards this will even out.

Roleplaying games where a group of people face off against a single individual will always have a problem of the party killing off foes quickly. If a 6th level (or a 16th level) party had CRs they would each be X CR. Putting something of CR X against a group of well organized (not all parties but most are) CR X creatures is guaranteed to make for a short fight.
Why is it strange that four ogres can beat the stuffing out of a single ogre fairly quickly?

 

[RyanD]

Re: Re: Re: Re: The problem isn't the monster, it's the CR system

You stated this twice in your post, but you never state why.

My opinion is that the design problem can be compared to a tree with many branches and subbranches. [To restate: The design problem is that the inputs to the CR/EL/XP calculation break down above a certain average party character level and cease being useful to DMs in creating effective and fun challenges.]

At low levels, there are only a few branches (powers, abilities, etc.) available. Coming up with a "one size fits all" CR value for challenges is relatively easy at this point in the game; its even easier if you constrain the problem by saying "we're generating values based on an assumption that the party is 4 PCs; a Figher, Wizard, Cleric and Rogue."

As game time progresses (and thus powers, abilities, etc. expand in number and complexity), the system of one-size-fits-all CRs becomes less and less valuable to the DM, and the DM has to spend more and more time "adjusting" each CR to fit the needs of the specific characters in the party. However, since the CR values are not calculated according to any kind of system, there's no obvious or easy way for the DM to do that. In a sense, the DM must become a game designer, deconstruct the creature into all its component parts, determine a relative weighting of those parts, then reconstruct a game-specific CR value.

Obvious problems: Most DMs aren't capable of doing that work (mostly due to lack of experience and mentoring, not due to intelligence or raw ability). And the DM probably has a significantly impacted understanding of the scope of the powers and abilities possessed by the PCs - especially if that DM is dealing with "portable" PCs that are not organic and exclusively played in the DM's only campaign. That impacted understanding will in turn translate into errors in the re-weighting process, so CRs will often turn out either too high (or far more commonly) too low.

Now, factor in the effects of multiclassing and prestige classes, and you take a situation that is already fundamentally flawed (definition: less fun than it should be for a given amount of work), and the whole system degrades even further.

So what we get in actual practice is a large community of DMs who "cheat" by simply adding HP to monsters after the fight begins, or fudging saves or other die rolls to keep the beasties in the fight longer, or any number of other variations, which (due to their ad hoc nature) often create more problems in the long run than they solve. [ There's also a community of DMs who reach a point of diminishing returns as they try to play the game "by the book" who eventually give up and either cap the power level of their games arbitrarily, engage in serial restarts, or abandon the game due to frustrations at not being able to make it work as advertised - none of which does the player network any good long term! ]

It's a fallacy that systems are inherently better than design judgement.

That's not exactly the argument I'm making.

It would be more acurate to say that due to the simplistic nature of the CR system, as presented in the DMG, DMs are not given enough information to make informed, effective judgements on how to alter the CRs of challenges to best fit the party who will confront them.

I'm all for simple systems - when those simple systems work most of the time. And for D&D, the CR system works across a larger range of character level values than the old 2E system did. But 3E also scales up much better than 2E ever did, and so the 3E CR system is being forced to operate past the point of its maximum utility. And after that point, it gets less and less useful (and thus creates negative utility) at a rate proportional to how for the PCs levels are from that inflection point.

I think that what can be done is that a sizable number of "best practices" in challenge design can be codified and then quantified on a per monster basis to enable DMs to reduce the level of "game design" we expect them to engage in, and increase the amount of "informed judgement" they can leverage to maximize the fun level in the game.

Does that make any sense, or have I obfuscated myself past the point of coherence?

 

[Staffan]

Another option is to ignore the XP part of Challenge Ratings. Star Wars, for example, doesn't even use CRs. Instead, it asks the DM to eyeball the length of an adventure and hand out a total of 1000-4000 XP multiplied by the average party level (and divided by the number of party members), leading to pretty much the same "1 level per 4 sessions" that D&D's "13.33 encounters per level" does. As a side effect, this discourages the hack-and-slash mentality often seen in D&D - I know there are guidelines in the DMG for giving out non-combat XP, but it doesn't exactly encourage it.

I wouldn't abandon CR entirely, because it's still a useful tool for estimating the difficulty of an encounter. I would just disconnect it from XP.

 

[greymarch]

Holy cow! When I started this message thread, I expected to get violently flamed for speaking out against SKR, so I avoided reading the thread for most of the day. I am glad to see that it has grown into a serious discussion of the validity of high level monsters and high level play.

I will post my complete thoughts in the morning. Its now 12:30am here in Phoenix, and late night thought processes usually do not provide useful wisdom or insight

 

[Mouseferatu]

Another option is to ignore the XP part of Challenge Ratings. Star Wars, for example, doesn't even use CRs. Instead, it asks the DM to eyeball the length of an adventure and hand out a total of 1000-4000 XP multiplied by the average party level (and divided by the number of party members), leading to pretty much the same "1 level per 4 sessions" that D&D's "13.33 encounters per level" does. As a side effect, this discourages the hack-and-slash mentality often seen in D&D - I know there are guidelines in the DMG for giving out non-combat XP, but it doesn't exactly encourage it.

I wouldn't abandon CR entirely, because it's still a useful tool for estimating the difficulty of an encounter. I would just disconnect it from XP.

This is similar to what I've done--and, in fact, what I've been doing (to an extent) since second edition.

I give XP based on story awards, role-playing, length of adventure, etc. I use the CR system only as a general estimate to answer one question. "Is this encounter going to provide an appropriate challenge without wiping out the party?"

I can appreciate the need for a more complete system like the one Ryan's discussing, but I think such a system could very quickly and easily grow so complex as to be worse than useless. As it stands now, giving XP "by the book" in 3E borders on more math than I like doing in my games. (That's one of many reasons I kept my story-awards-only system when I switched to 3E.) I think anything that requires the DM to do more figuring than "compare this number to that number" is going to slow things down and makes things difficult.

If DMing becomes more of a chore and less of a fun pasttime, people aren't going to do it. I know that I'd DM a lot less if I was forced to give XP by the book--not because the calculations are particularly difficult, but because that's not why I DM. As soon as it becomes a task rather than a hobby, something's gone wrong.

And Ryan, please note that I'm not saying your idea must automatically become ponderous and unwieldy--just that I fear it very easily could.